Give an update on IBM’s role in developer’s community?Simply, making the services available is not enough. The other part lies in how we develop software assets in this category. These software assets are usually tied to how fast people adopt an API. We are committed to deliver essential elements to India Stack.

What’s your role with India Stack?Digital interaction starts with data sets and then you bring in A.I. to make sense of the data and create insights. India Stack is putting this entire framework in place for authentication and digital signature. It’s an important cog in the wheel, so to realize these end to end scenarios at scale you really must integrate and provide developers a gateway into that. It’s much beyond providing platform and APIs.

Where does Watson fit into the whole scenario?The developer is not a monolithic entity, depending upon the context in which they are operating. There is a whole lot of support that the developer’s needs, it’s not just the tools or the APIs, but in terms of the right problem statement and the right data from different domains. This is not just an API strategy; it’s this whole area that we call the Watson Data platform.

We are bringing together powerful capabilities for them based on all of this mass update and that’s going to be a mix of private, public and licensed data. The point is they need to operate in this ecosystem and we are making available some of the core elements from what they can use to build compelling applications and then whether they are working for an ISV or within an enterprise, startups;

How many developers on an average would you have helped with your platform so far in the last one year?We have tried to reach developers on two main channels. We do meet-ups, hacks and even summits. There are 21 million developers worldwide and around 3.5 million in India. There is a pipeline of 11 million developers whom we are trying to reach each through different vehicles.

How do you plan to take the AI platform forward?We have seen around 42 % developers work on cognitive. For example, chat bots don’t always actually touch the elements of this architecture. But we still think that everything that we are actually doing in terms of making an available, the platform is gifting people direct access actually to development that they need to do into the cognitive.

We make our own employees developer advocates, we realize how we are skilling our own employees to be ready for the new App. Let me just take one story line along with that, we did Watson hack last year and two hundred thousand of our employees participated in that. With the idea of building awareness to proficiencies in relation to cognitive development, but I think about 8 thousand solutions came out of that.

So, if there are three areas, its cognitive, data science and AI, with AI and data being very closely linked together. We personally believe that the data science and cognitive developers will be more closely linked in the development then they actually ever had before.So, the best conversation that we have with developers are, where we actually naturally leading to AI in a data conversation. So, it’s not designed into our outreach to talk about what you can do with particular API.

Will AI take away jobs?Platform like Watson making several jobs invalid doesn’t sound true, at the same time new jobs will be created to take care of this. But this is domain specific. People who are not familiar with the details or haven’t seen the sector up close, they tend to make sort of a broad statement that its going to take away our job but actually if you observe, we are putting this technology out there for very hard problem like cancer.

If you want to give a right treatment, humanly it’s not possible to ingest and make sense of all this data. Even if a doctor didn’t eat or sleep, just kept reading these papers, he can’t keep up with the rate at which information is getting created.

We can play our role in terms of making people ready for that new economy. But to say that somehow AI is actually causing it is incorrect.

Are you making developer more empowered than a CIO with decision making?We do believe that the developers are the decision makers. They are the one who are influencing the platform, the languages. Those businesses would not exist without developers. The next generation that we see, those disruptions are only going to be more and the developers are the key. The developer is the person who help him do that and that’s why believe the developer is basically the king.

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As the Special Chief Secretary & IT Advisor to the Chief Minister - Govt. of Andhra Pradesh, J A Chowdary is all for chasing new growth horizons, pursuing radically different development approaches and outguessing technology trends that will shape the future.